Linux 3.18 Diseased Newt Released

December 8, 2014

By
Sean Michael Kerner

Linus Torvalds formally released the Linux 3.18 kernel on December 7, even though a regression issue that first showed up in Linux 3.17 has yet to be resolved.

"I'd love to say that we've figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven't," Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. " At the same time, there's absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn't make sense."

Looking at Linux 3.18 in terms of new features, one of the most noticeable for many users will be the vastly improved suspend and resume speed.

"This tree includes a single commit that speeds up x86, suspend/resume by replacing a naive 100msec sleep based polling loop with proper completion notification," Linux developer Ingo Molnar wrote in his Linux 3.18 git pull message. " This gives some real suspend/resume benefit on servers with larger core counts."